§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising, such as online advertising for example. In particular, the present invention concerns improving the values of serving advertisements, such as cost per impression advertisements for example.
§1.2 Background Information
Advertising using traditional media, such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, is well known. Unfortunately, even when armed with demographic studies and entirely reasonable assumptions about the typical audience of various media outlets, advertisers recognize that much of their ad budget is simply wasted. Moreover, it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.
Recently, advertising over more interactive media has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, advertisers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to advertise.
Interactive advertising provides opportunities for advertisers to target their ads to a receptive audience. That is, targeted ads are more likely to be useful to end users since the ads may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.). Query keyword targeting has been used by search engines to deliver relevant ads. For example, the AdWords advertising system by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. (referred to as “Google”), delivers ads targeted to keywords from search queries. Similarly, content targeted ad delivery systems have been proposed. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No.: 10/314,427 (incorporated herein by reference and referred to as “the '427 application”), titled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR SERVING RELEVANT ADVERTISEMENTS”, filed on Dec. 6, 2002 and listing Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik and Paul Buchheit as inventors; and Ser. No. 10/375,900 (incorporated by reference and referred to as “the '900 application”), titled “SERVING ADVERTISEMENTS BASED ON CONTENT,” filed on Feb. 26, 2003 and listing Darrell Anderson, Paul Buchheit, Alex Carobus, Claire Cui, Jeffrey A. Dean, Georges R. Harik, Deepak Jindal and Narayanan Shivakumar as inventors, describe methods and apparatus for serving ads relevant to the content of a document, such as a Web page for example. Content targeted ad delivery systems, such as the AdSense advertising system by Google for example, have been used to serve ads on Web pages.
As can be appreciated from the foregoing, serving ads relevant to concepts of text in a text document and serving ads relevant to keywords in a search query are useful because such ads presumably concern a current user interest. Consequently, such online advertising has become increasingly popular. Moreover, advertising using other targeting techniques, and even untargeted online advertising, has become increasingly popular.
Initially, advertisers paid for online advertising on a cost per impression (or cost per 1,000 impressions, often referred to as “CPM”) basis. However, since many advertisers value impressions that lead potential customers to their Website, many advertising networks adopted a pay per ad selection (often referred to as a cost per click (or “CPC”) pricing model. Such a pricing model adequately reflected the value proposition of many advertisers. Further, since some sophisticated advertising networks such as AdWords and AdSense from Google use selection rate (e.g., selections per impressions, also referred to as click-through rate (or “CTR”) in scoring ads competing for various ad spots, and CTR is a good indicator of the usefulness of an ad to end users, such a pricing model is also beneficial to end users.
Although many advertisers appreciate the CPC pricing model, some advertisers are interested mainly in branding and are therefore primarily concerned with ad impressions. Such advertisers would like to use a CPM pricing model. Moreover, often such advertisers would like to spend their budget. That is, if a CPM advertiser budgets $1,000 per week for an ad campaign, it would like to spend that entire amount, but not more. Most ad systems today are optimized to meet reservation commitments (e.g. 10,000 page views in the month of March).
Existing advertising systems, such as systems that use or support a CPM pricing model, could be improved. For example, although CPM advertisers are primarily concerned with impressions, many would find it useful to get better or more valuable impressions.